Brendan O’Connor: Glenda's got a golden boot
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It's amazing what one swift, well-aimed kick to the bollicks can do to a man. The collapse of the property market in which he made his millions, the taking over of his loans by Nama, the change in the mood of the country towards developers, none of these things could topple the bould Johnny Ronan.
But a kick in the McSorleys in Ranelagh, in a weekend when the nation, ironically, was obsessing about quare-shaped balls, started in train a series of events that led to an ill-advised drunken trip to Morroco with what the Irish Times called "a neighbour's child" (Rosanna Davison) and ultimately to this weekend's sad news that the most colourful, the boldest, the biggest-thinking of them all is stepping down for a while, retreating to the naughty step, to think about what he has done.
Tellingly, all of those involved in the soap opera are now at various stages of leaving the country. Rosanna is gone, Johnny is apparently going, and Glenda apparently wants to go. Of course, you could argue that it was leaving the country that got them all into this mess in the first place. Homer Simpson said it about alcohol, but it appears that in Ireland, leaving the country is the cause of, and the solution to, all our problems. Mix alcohol with leaving the country and you've got a dangerous cocktail.
Back in the surreal days of the boom it was all about leaving the country. You could do it every weekend if you wanted to, and no one would really notice because they would either be abroad themselves, or drunk.
But the mood changed and no one told poor Johnny.
A couple of years ago his fellow Celtic Tigers would have enjoyed his Morrocan antics as they read them in their Sunday Indo down in Marbella or through the haze of their own boozy weekend. But somehow, as people sat down with their Sunday Indo last week they didn't have the stomach for revelling in Johnny's antics.
And somehow, the fact that we all believed we were paying for Johnny's business didn't help either.
Right now, it probably is best for Johnny to keep the head down, sell the Maybach for whatever he can get, and act humble. In the future, historians will divide Ireland into two distinct periods -- pre- and post-Marrakech.
We live in a post-Marrakech, post-Johnny and Glenda world now and people need to start acting like they know when they've been Nama-ed. In the meantime, respondents to today's Sunday Independent/Quantum Research poll see a bright future for Glenda as the national ball kicker. They believe she should apply her stylishly attired foot to Seanie Fitz's groin next, followed by Brian Cowen, Enda Kenny, Jack O'Connor and Dan Boyle. Glenda's could be the most popular foot in the country since Ronan O'Gara's.
Poll respondents did not believe overall that the Glenda and Johnny story was true love and their sympathies lay with Glenda, rather than Rosanna or Johnny.
Hopefully that will not prove a further kick in the, em... teeth for the developer as he sits nursing his wounds this weekend.
Originally published in
